Mindreef announced Mindreef Coral, a Web services lifecycle collaboration platform for organizations building Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). It enables individual users, service teams, and service consumers to collaborate and share information, regardless of role, skill set, or development environment. Mindreef Coral is based on the usage data and the real-world experiences of thousands of users of Mindreef SOAPscope, the company’s diagnostic tool for Web services.

“SOA is impossible without effective collaboration,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at the Burton Group. “SOA is all about collaboration and reuse. There are few significant technical hurdles to SOA adoption; people-oriented issues are the challenge. A lot of people think problems can be solved with technology, but they are not taking into account the organizational and cultural issues."

Mindreef Coral addresses the challenges of SOA collaboration by supplying teams with servers that can be linked together. Each Mindreef Coral server acts as a hub housing Web service data and containing XML-aware tools that allow team members to govern, test, diagnose and support Web services collaboratively. Mindreef Coral’s tools are available to various roles including architects, managers, business analysts, developers, testers and support staff and enable roles that do not have deep XML or programming skills to perform tasks that previously required more technical skills.

“In moving to a Web services-based SOA, we've quickly seen the need for more formal communications as our service teams become more distributed,” noted Chris Brown, Vice President, Retail Senior Integration Architect at Wachovia Corporation, which uses Mindreef. “Mindreef Coral provides us with a highly intuitive platform that makes it easy for team members to work collaboratively as they design, test, and support our services. We have developed a dependency on the platform as our major testing suite for our Web services initiatives.”